Saturday Blog-Browsing (Update)

*Phaedrus at No Fear of Freedom links to the Time Magazine story on Junior’s “credibility gap” and pulls out a quote from RNC Chair Ed Gillespie complaining about Democratic campaigning:

“It’s only February and they [Editor’s emphasis] have made clear they intend to run the dirtiest campaign in modern presidential politics.”

That’s right, the Dems are the dirty fighters. I keep forgetting.

BTW, re that cover: “Does Bush Have A Credibility Gap?” is a question, after 3 years of lies, distortions, misdirection and mendacity, that could only be asked seriously by a total moroon or by somebody who’s been trapped underground in a cave since July of 2000. It’s a “Does a bear shit in the woods?”, “Is the Pope Catholic?”, “Who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb?” kind of question, and the fact that it has taken this friggin’ long for a major newsmagazine to notice it says a good deal about the parlous state of our news media.

*Benedict Spinoza of Benedict@Large links to John Dean’s dissection of Bush’s Executive Order creating the new commission that’s supposed to study the role of the intelligence community in the Iraq War, and it’s even worse than we thought. The order specifically forbids the Commission from looking at the stove-piping question by putting the two major potential culprits–Doug Feith’s Office of Special Plans (OSP) and the little internal operation Cheney ran out of the Veep’s office that gave us Ahmad Chalabi and his Fantasy Follies–off-limits. Well, I mean, you didn’t think Junior was serious, did you?

*Frank Mayhar at I Protest has a withering denunciation of Rich Lowry’s NRO column ascribing poverty to, well, I better let Rich tell it. He says it so much better than I could.

Poverty in America is primarily a cultural phenomenon, driven by a shattered work ethic and sexual irresponsibility…..Child poverty would be nearly obliterated if every household had one adult working full time and married parents.

Uh-huh. Here’s Frank on this right-wing claptrap:

So. The reason these families are poor is because the parents don’t want to work. Pretty amazing. I wish that someone had told my parents that, when I was growing up. Oh, wait, my parents did work. Both of them. My father fulltime and my mother varying between part-time and fulltime. And somehow, in spite of them working so much, we were still poor.Rich Lowry is a pig-ignorant moron who not only has obviously not had to do an honest day’s work in his life, but who has no experience whatsoever with poverty in any way, shape or form. It’s blindingly obvious that this idiot doesn’t even know any poor people.

*Jeanne at Body and Soul has a brilliant post in which she pulls nuggets of meaning out of recent articles in which people who knew Bush in the days of his supposed service talk about what they thought of him. Among other overlooked observations, Jeanne notes that Junior was actually ambitious! But wait…isn’t that supposed to be BAD? I mean, the Echo Chamber is attacking Kerry for the exact same thing.

How many times have I heard [Bush] contrasted with Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and now John Kerry, all of whom were supposed to have been planning political careers since childhood? The implication is always that there is something twisted about ambitious young men, and that you can never really trust their good deeds and accomplishments because they only did those things in service to their own raging ambition. Great men — like our fearless leader — have greatness thrust upon them.Well, excuse me, but here we have someone who’s trying to help Bush out telling us that Bush had exactly the same ambition as a young man, that — like Bill Clinton — he was planning this career for a good part of his life. The difference, of course, is that even while he was planning to go into politics, he felt no need to do anything that would make him worthy of leadership.

And still doesn’t.

*At the american street, skippy catches Ann Coulter perpetrating a particularly nasty slander against Viet Nam war vet Max Cleland. This is going too far even for her–she claims Max lost his limbs in an “accident” when he was on his way to ” to drink beer with friends.” In fact, of course, Cleland was alighting from a helicopter on a combat mission to set up a radio relay station. Coulter is completely off the reservation and if the radcons want to salvage any credibility at all, they need to muzzle this hateful pea-brain’s yawp. Soon.

Update, 4/10/07: They didn’t muzzle her and their credibility is in the toilet.